On yet another level, it is also the story of Delhi, the globalizing capital of a once new nation, and of its many layers, ‘a palimpsest, a composite landscape made of different built forms superimposed one upon each other with the passing of time.’1 No coincidence, then, that the year of the novel’s publication marked the beginning of a new century, even as it bade farewell to the old.
Aranya writes, sitting in her bastion atop a high-rise on the eastern side of the city, about the transition of Old Delhi to New Delhi, and from New Delhi to what it is now. The spiritual experience that marks Ishan takes place in Almora surrounded by the Himalayas, and includes people like Krishna Prem, once a Professor of English at Lucknow University, Shunyata, the Danish follower of Ramana Maharishi, and an American couple who had been friends of Frieda and D.H. Lawrence. The interweaving of Aranya’s and Ishan’s memories with the narrative of their gradually evolving relationship creates the palimpsest that is this slim novel. It is a palimpsest of time, a palimpsest of all the moods of the ragas Ishan listens to—calm, restless, angry, fearful, loving, happy, melancholy, fearful.
In the course of her life, Aranya moves from one Delhi to another, to finally settle in a trans-Yamuna residential complex, the past Delhis glimmering from the other side of the river:
‘In the distance, the dome of Humayun’s tomb basked in its arc of sunlight. The warmth of the winter sun lightly brushed her clothes. The endless drama of existence, and on such a vast stage.
‘This earth, the sky, the sun, the winds, and us.‘What remained to be enacted on this stage?’
The partition of the subcontinent destroys and overlays the beauty and grace of Shahjahanabad:
‘The trams and their tracks vanished from the streets in a wink. The row of trees lining Chandni Chowk were chopped. Stoves were lit on the pavements and dal and rotis began to be made there. The Lahore Gate of the Red Fort looked on in silence. As did the residents of Delhi. Parts of the wall encircling the city were swept away. The gardens on the outskirts of Old Delhi were rapidly sold off and, in no time, disappeared into the master plan. Villages underwent a complete metamorphosis. Three hundred and four villages of Delhi district were transformed into bigger settlements. Their identities were preserved in the names of streets and small shops. And like them, we, young citizens of yesteryears, were transformed into the senior citizens of today.’
The destruction of this landscape alternates with the calm of a yet older Delhi, its ghosts laid to rest now, and recalled as Ishan and Aranya walk in Lodi Gardens:
‘The trees beyond the mosque stay calm, laden with their own capricious branches. Who knows what the flocks of birds are saying to each other?’
Krishna Sobti possesses an uncanny ability to grasp complex changes in the geographical and social make-up of Delhi, its building, rebuilding, destruction and reconstruction, and to weave them, simply and deeply, into her fiction:
‘… when I sleep, I see long rows of laburnum, yellow blossoms and green fruit dangling from their boughs. I feel like a tree myself, covered in yellow and green. I used to walk on blazing, beautiful Hailey Road in the mornings and evenings. Perhaps that’s lurking somewhere in my mind.’
‘Friendships would the measure the roads; the destination was Connaught Place. Those bubbly, beautiful days, of picking restaurants. Standard, Gaylord, Volga, Embassy, La Bohéme, Nirula’s, York, Ginza, Alps, Maidens.’
And now, in the discontinuity of the mega-city with no definable centre, the barren landscape of its exurbs dotted with jhuggis, the brand new roads which carry no memories of the past, the small DDA park is the one refuge of senior citizens who congregate there in the evenings, to silently document those who have begun to miss their daily walk, the terminally ill, and the wholly missing. The global connect goes hand in hand with the local disconnect of the inhabitants of the high rise apartment blocks with ‘… (t)hose who have no role to play in the new metropolis [and] are made virtually invisible by being “inserted into other discourses” or else they become demonized, as the enemy within, floating populations of urban nomads filling “pockets of hard, local realities,” carriers of poverty, disease, drugs, crime, and violence’2:
‘Ahead, there was a tangled cluster of jhuggis, huddled under slanted roofs made of sacking and blue and yellow plastic, just wide enough to hide your heads, and held to the ground by ends tucked into stones. From the ones made by shutting off the openings of barrels, emerges, along with the wet smoke from a coal sigri, the sound of a child crying. The dry sobbing of a child rolling on a half wet mud floor. The rain must be dripping in. The mother must be looking for a way to stop the leaking.
‘Where will the child go after it grows out of the jhuggi? Will this Abhimanyu be able to escape his chakravyuha? Will he be able to emancipate himself from hustling narcotics or will he be crushed by the weight of generations? Will he be able to enter a clean brick house? Will he partake in the comforts of life? Will the imperial gaze of history manage to take note of him while there is still time? Will buying things at the Sunday flea market rescue him? Will he be able to fulfill his desire to buy new old-looking denims? Will the favours meted out by social welfare reach this puny citizen? Will the strength to sustain himself survive that long? He has sixteen to eighteen years to reach adulthood. It may be possible to become a politician in the next century. Who knows whether he’ll behave like a hero or a villain?’
Aranya and Ishan share a deep awareness of nature, the tiny joys of everyday and their dry humour, but for all the consonances there are dissonances, in their philosophical preoccupations, in their respective styles of living – the quiet, controlled interior of Ishan’s apartment, the regular rhythm of his daily life, as against the anarchy of Ananya’s existence and her acute awareness of social and political issues. They clash, sometimes bitterly, on the intensity and pervasiveness of his spiritual life, his belief in the security offered by the extended family, even as both are confronted by the insecurity and anxiety of what they observe in their circle of acquaintances, men and women, widowed or single, ageing alone, and vulnerable to the rage and violence of irate brothers and sons, waiting to take possession of what they have long regarded as their due: Damyanti, once fashionable, still radiating the sophistication of the once elegant Delhi and Lahore, driven to death by her son and daughter-in-law; quick, alert, cosmopolitan Kamini, who was famous for her beauty, who had studied in Benares and Allahabad, is slowly poisoned by her brothers’ doctor in collusion with her young maid; Lala Prabhudayal, who had set up house with a woman in his old age in Meerut, whose sons have him strangled in cold blood. Can the family continue to offer protection in the face of the demands of modern consumerist culture, which entails living in flats designed to spatially accommodate only nuclear families:
‘One’s rights shrink with time … The warmth and oppression of living with the family, both come at once. The pre-conditions and predicaments of age. Then there is the shortage of space. The children aren’t entirely in the wrong. In flats with just two or three bedrooms, two generations have to somehow make do with each other.’
Focalized largely through Ananya, with insertions of Ishan’s thoughts, Shunyata’s letters, and his own, this short, beautifully structured novel, tells both of coming to terms with age—
‘Aranya stretched her arms and opened the window: Keep blowing, sun-drenched winds, as long as I am alive. Keep reaching out to me. I wish my time here to be vibrant. All that bears fruit, all that is created—I wish to mark flowerbeds of words with that.
‘No one is excluded from the pressure of existence.
Fire lives off the death of Earth
Wind, off the death of fire
Water, off the death of wind
And Earth is kept alive by the death of water.’
—and of Aranya’s coming to terms with Ishan, with his sensibility and awareness. The tenderness but also the tensions of this relationship, as it reaches fruition, culminate in Malkauns, a midnight raga, signalling the
meeting of two days on a calendar.
The Sweep of Krishna Sobti’s work
Daar Se Bichhudi, Krishna Sobti’s first novel, was published in book form in 1958,1 and Samay Sargam was published in 2000. At one end of Sobti’s range then, we have the story of a young girl in mid-nineteenth century rural Punjab on the verge of entering womanhood. At the other end, as we have seen, is the tale of an autumnal relationship set on the ever-expanding edges of Delhi in the late twentieth century. Krishna Sobti’s writing captures moments of radical transformation in life and society always in a few strokes which are as bold as they are subtle. From youth or old age, rural to urban, feudal to post-modern, she covers all.
The early novels, Daar Se Bichhudi (1958) and Mitro Marjani (1966), with which she established her reputation for all time, display the same perfection of craft, the same clear-eyed lyricism, the empathy and detachment, and the depth of historical awareness, which have distinguished Krishna Sobti’s writing from the start.2 They simultaneously register and balance violence with tenderness, brutality with compassion. This balancing act is so delicate and subtle that to dwell on it is almost to distort it.
The ‘dramatization of desire’ of the women at the centre of Krishna Sobti’s novels, their sexuality and their social transgressions, have drawn readerly and scholarly attention since the 1950s. For instance, the psychoanalyst and cultural psychologist, Sudhir Kakar, spoke on Mitro of Mitro Marjani:
‘Her husband, the two brothers-in-law, and their wives, the husband’s old parents, are all bit players in the dramatization of her desire, existing only to enhance and provide counterpoints to Mitro’s moods and actions … Mitro’s husband suspects her of promiscuous tendencies, a belief that the spirited young woman does nothing to dispel. Indeed, she underlines this impression by the evident pride she takes in the fullness of her body, the sexual banter she carries on with her brother-in-law and the candid confession of her sexual hunger to her sister-in-law.’3
Yet, these moments of rebellion are seldom celebrated in Sobti’s novels as mindless defiance alone. There is also an inbuilt narrative balance, never heavy-handed, never insistent; the touch is light, however heavy the subject. Alongside the desire that threatens their stability, there is also empathy for the families which are being resisted, which fight for their honour as they see fit, and their at times gentle, at times violent efforts to prevent disaster. In Daar Se Bichhudi, Pasho recalls her grandmother’s warning when she became aware of the attention Pasho attracted in the streets: ‘one step out of line and your life will crumble to dust.’4 And in Mitro Marjani, the elder sister-in-law tells the wild, defiant Mitro: ‘Devrani, for daughters and daughters-in-law, the home and hearth are the farthest limits. If they cross these …’5
Mitro’s mother-in-law remains considerate to the end: ‘Beti, listen to me. Spend a month or two at your mother’s, do all the necessary fasts and rituals. And I’ll take care of things here. When my bahurani returns, all her wishes will come true.’
In the end, it is Mitro herself who recognizes that her mother’s self-centred promiscuity has left her desperately alone in her old age, and she herself restores the balance she needs in her life.
Alongside this interplay of the personal and the social, of women young and old, it is worth recalling, once more, the historic depth that is so distinct a mark of Sobti’s work. To turn again to her first novel, Daar Se Bichhudi was written when the wounds of Partition were still fresh. The memories of the violence which had accompanied the British conquest of Punjab in 1849, provided a palimpsest for that of 1947. The Hindu Khatris and the Muslim Khoja Sheikhs of mid-nineteenth century Punjab could get involved in bloody feuds, yet remain mindful of each other’s cultural sensitivities and cater to them in delicate social situations. That culture seemed to have passed away forever.
In the preface to the new Hindi edition of the novel, Sobti speaks of the moment when the story first came to her, recalling the memories that squarely mapped the landscape of rural Punjab on to the cityscape of New Delhi:
‘The days immediately after Partition. February weather with its flurry of leaves and wind had descended on Delhi. I always become restless in the month of my birth, shaken out of my roots before the month of Baishakh passes, not quite knowing what the dustladen winds sweeping through me are saying, sending god knows what sad, wilted messages, secreted from their dark inner recesses.
‘That heartrending tumult again.
Allah-o-Akbar.
Har-har Mahadev.
Partition. Division. 1947.
‘… Who knows what corpse-like shadows, from what towns, lost, wandering, scattered, had collected in the capital with what remained of the people from their localities.
‘Crowds, sometimes in P-Block, at other times in the Ministry for Rehabilitation, sometimes in Purana Qila, Firoz Shah Kotla, Kingsway Camp. At other times at Turkman Gate, looking for livelihood, Kazi Hauz, Khari Baoli, Fatehpuri, Lal Qila, Jama Masjid. Chandni Chowk.
‘… I had passed the Sindhia House crossing and was walking on the pavement of Curzon Road. ‘… What was this? ‘Shah Alami displayed itself before my eyes on the pavement of Curzon Road. Small and big shops, decked out and decorated, crowds of alert, adroit youth, the elderly and the old. Children holding their mothers’ hands. Hindu women, Muslim women, colourful chunnies, ribbons, bangles, vegetables, fruits, turbans, drying at the dyers. Suddenly, the glimpse of a face, like an inscription on the visage of the crowd.
‘… What would be the name of this girl? Should I ask?’6
This is Pasho, a young Khatri girl of great sensuous beauty, who lives in Shah Alami, a village in mid-nineteenth century West Punjab. Her beautiful mother, widowed early, has defied convention and become the wife of a Khoja Sheikh in his high haveli. When Pasho, left with her maternal grandmother, regarded with suspicion and mistreated by her uncles, runs away to her mother, she discovers to her delight that she has a Muslim half-brother. But fearing blood shed, the Sheikh arranges for Pasho’s marriage with a Hindu Diwan, old enough to be her father, but at once attracted to the young girl.
If the fierce antagonism between Khatris and the Sheikhs when it comes to marriage alliances is not glossed over, there is also a sense of respect for those to whom the difference is a matter of life and death. As her brother tells Pasho, when he visits her before she gets married, there had been a meeting between his parents and their mother’s family, mediated by the elders of the village council. It hovered on the edge of extreme violence. But once the uncles heard that Pasho would go to a Hindu home, the meeting took a completely different turn. The elder uncle’s eyes filled with tears; he bowed his head before the Sheikh: ‘Sheikh-ji, you’ve given back to us the good name we unfortunates had lost once. May the creator be thanked, may He be thanked; our girl is now ensconced in a kulin family.’7
This short period of peace is followed by the death of Diwan ji, who fathers a son in his old age. The successive acts of violence that are visited upon Pasho culminate in the Sikh wars, the brutality of being sold into servitude, and the final defeat of the Sikhs by the British in 1849, after which Pasho lands in a firangi camp, to be tossed around by the joking soldiers. Only when her half-brother locates and carries her back home to her Muslim family, does she find acceptance, mirrored in her mother’s words, that she is joined at last to the branch from which she had been so tragically separated.
Let us revert to the moment of creation of which Krishna Sobti speaks in her preface, recalling the violence of Partition:
‘This is also battle. A war. Have we lost or won this war? Freedom. Freedom and Partition, both in one.’
And to the moment when a young girl spoke the introductory words of the story to her creator:
‘One night, I was sitting at my table when someone whispered into my ear. May they live. May they stay alive. ‘Forgetting accusations, complaint, pain, sorrow, bitterness, who was saying this to me, may all stay alive?’8
It was Pasho’s voice, refl
ected in the opening of the novel.
‘May they live. Stay alive. May they all live and stay alive. ‘Good, bad, mine and not-mine—linked in whatever way to me—may they all live.
‘Just a moment ago, I had wanted to say, let them all perish. May no one live, may no one stay alive. If I die, may I take everyone else along with me. If fate has chosen to forget this unlucky one, why should anyone else live?
‘… But if the creator filled my lap, filled it with prosperity, why shouldn’t humankind also prosper? Why shouldn’t mine and not-mine live and stay alive? Those who held out their arms to help me in my adversity, and joined me with their branch, why shouldn’t their households laugh and play in all their plenitude?
‘May they all live! May they all stay alive!’9
How often has it been possible to say these words after Partition?
PS 1
1 David Harvey, ‘Urban Places in the “Global Village”: Reflections on the Urban Condition in Late Twentieth Century Capitalism’ in World Cities and the Future of the Metropolis (ed) Luigi Mazza (Milano: Electa, 1988), pp. 21–33.
2 Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), p. 151.
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1 Translated into English as Memory’s Daughter, trans. Smita Bharti and Meenakshi Bharadwaj (Delhi: Katha, 2007).
2 For an analysis of the historical depth of vision peculiar to her, see also my essay on Sobti’s Dil-o-Danish (1993), ‘The Spaces of Love and the Passing of the Seasons: Delhi in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Francesca Orsini’s Love in South Asia: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). The novel is set in early 1920s Delhi, centred in Chandni Chowk, still buzzing with post-Mughal culture, but gradually anglicizing, the adjoining Civil Lines beckoning with their promise of a socially flexible life for women as much as men.
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